Lionel Shriver airs grievances by reimagining American society

It began with a sombrero. In 2016, the novelist Lionel Shriver showed up at the Brisbane Writers Festival in Australia wearing an ostentatiously large straw variation of the traditional Mexican headgear. Shriver is not Mexican; that was the point.

In a speech, Shriver lashed out against the idea of cultural appropriation, as well as what she described as “a larger climate of super-sensitivity, giving rise to proliferating prohibitions supposedly in the interest of social justice that constrain fiction writers and prospectively makes our work impossible.” She was against woke before woke was a thing one had to be adamantly for or against. Which makes her woke, in a way. I know, it gets confusing.

“Mania,” her 15th work of fiction, mines a similar vein of grievance, for much the same audience. Clever but cold, this angrily speculative work imagines an American society basically identical to ours except in one crucial respect: A “Mental Parity” movement victorious at every level and in every institution, from nursery schools to the White House, has essentially outlawed intelligence or expressions of it, whether casually (that device you’re always checking? You can’t call it a smartphone anymore) or professionally (even surgeons and airline pilots are no longer selected according to intellectual aptitude).

“No, smart and evil aren’t any different,” a character says. “Not anymore.”

Stupidity, on the other hand, is exalted, uplifted, promoted at every turn as if it were the highest of virtues. The rising popularity of Mental Parity throughout the late aughts is helped along by a bestselling book, “The Calumny of IQ: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight.” You are clearly supposed to think of Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist,” which topped bestseller lists during the tumultuous summer of 2020. A fad becomes a movement, then the movement becomes the law of the land. In Shriver’s novel, Mensa, the club for really smart people, is “banned as the kind of cerebral-supremacist organization that the FBI now asserted was the greatest threat to American civic order.” I’ve read Donald Trump tweets more subtle than this.

In Shriver’s alternative version of America, Harvard-educated Barack Obama stood no chance when running for reelection in 2012, because, suddenly (the Mental Parity catches on with immense speed and traction, sort of like athleisure), the nation has no use for a president who speaks in complete sentences. Obama is challenged successfully in the Democratic primary by his own vice president Joe Biden, who is embraced in this new world for his evident mediocrity: “the more poorly Biden campaigned, the more voters he won over.”

We learn of this and other dispiriting developments from protagonist Pearson Converse, a literature professor at Voltaire University in the quasi-hinterlands of Pennsylvania. Converse seems to be a blend of the real Lionel Shriver and Lionel Shriver as her critics imagine her to be: principled but inexhaustible, idealistic but maybe a little mean. Two of Converse’s children are named Darwin and Zanzibar, which seems just a little too Park Slope or Silver Lake for the Philadelphia exurbs. The novel begins in 2011, with Darwin having been reprimanded for using an unpardonable imprecation at school: “stupid.”

Much of the plot concerns Converse’s relationship with her friend Emory Ruth, a radio host who is willing to play along with the Mental Parity regime to advance her career. Converse is not willing to do the same, and instead takes a dangerous but, in her view, necessary stance against a movement she deems — and, yes, Shriver uses the word —“retarded.” This frank assessment is captured in a viral video that serves as the novel’s denouement. There follows an Atlantic article penned by Converse. How a high-brow magazine like the Atlantic survived Mental Parity, I have no idea. Maybe they printed cartoons.

An unsubtle broadside against progressive scruples, “Mania” is an amusing book but not an entirely enjoyable one. If you think that Ben Shapiro frequently makes terrific points on his podcast and that Kamala Harris, when she is president, will make us all announce our personal pronouns, this Bud’s for you. Otherwise, Shriver’s world is too humid with her own ideological preoccupation for a prolonged stay. She clearly enjoyed writing “Mania” — maybe too much so. More than halfway through the novel, we learn that because it is a homonym for wisdom, the herb previously known as “sage” has been stripped of its name. Now, it is “poultry seasoning with furry leaves.” By page 141, where we encounter this observation, the seasoning has lost its taste.

In her finest novel, 2003’s “Can We Talk About Kevin,” Shriver explored the widely shared pathologies of American society through the crushingly unique (though increasingly common) viewpoint of a family whose son, the titular character, is on his way to becoming a school shooter. Unsparing in its assessment of American society, the novel rendered the monstrous all too human.

Novelists age like the rest of us. John Dos Passos infused his “U.S.A” trilogy with unabashedly socialist ideals, but by the 1950s, he was praising Joseph McCarthy and writing for National Review. Shriver has undergone a similar shift, only early enough in her prolific career for it to crash her prose like a loud, edgy houseguest.

“Watching an entire population swallow whole a transparently lunatic proposition and then jubilantly embrace a raft of ruinous new social conventions has profoundly lowered my estimation of people in general,” she writes as Converse. This is ungenerous stuff, the novel as a closed fist. Yes, Shriver created a world of her own. Not being a big Pennsylvania fan to begin with, I didn’t want to spend much time there.

There are, no doubt, many people who find Shriver’s grievances to be valid. I agree with some of them and, to an extent, with good-faith critiques of progressive cultural mores, especially the idea that better rhetoric equals a better society. But to turn those complaints into a novel would have required more than a witty conceit. For all its creative vehemence, “Mania” is little more than that.

Alexander Nazaryan writes about culture and politics.